Vatican Aide Calls for Not Letting Gays Be Priests

A top Vatican official has advised against bringing gays into the priesthood, saying their ordination would be imprudent and risky.

Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez’s letter, reproduced in a church publication, comes as the Vatican is drafting guidelines for accepting candidates for the priesthood. The guidelines are expected to address whether gays should be barred.

Medina Estevez’s position reflects what appears to be the Vatican’s emerging public stance on the issue. He was the prefect for the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments when the letter was written, although he retired in October.

Ordination “of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent, and from the pastoral point of view, very risky,” Medina Estevez wrote.

News reports in Italy and the United States in recent weeks have said that according to initial drafts of the new guidelines under consideration, the Vatican has decided that seminaries should bar men with homosexual tendencies.

That document is being prepared by another Vatican office, the Congregation for Catholic Education, and isn’t expected to be released until next year.

On Thursday, the Italian gay rights group Arcigay condemned Medina Estevez’s position, saying the Vatican was using gay priests as a scapegoat in the church’s pedophilia scandal.